Telit has expanded its collaboration with a Chinese start-up in the country’s fast-growing smart-grid sector, helping it to secure a spot in one of the world’s biggest markets for energy-related M2M technology.

Founded in 1996 and funded by the North China Electric Power Research Institute, Beijing Yupont develops electric power metering and automatic meter reading technologies, as well as geographical information systems, electric power meter and load control terminal products.

Telit (London, UK) first began working with the company in 2009, contributing its knowledge of the market and assisting with technical aspects of product development. As a result of that collaboration, Beijing Yupont won a supply contract worth more than $70 million with the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) in November last year, during what was the SGCC’s first open tender for AMR products.

“[That] makes it possible to run Yupont’s application inside the module, thus making it one of the smallest, most complete platforms for M2M solutions currently in use in China,” said Dominikus Hierl, chief marketing officer at Telit Wireless Solutions, in a statement.

Although the two companies have not provided firm details of how their collaboration will develop in the future, both sound eager to broaden the relationship.

“We look forward to further hastening M2M adoption in China with m2mAIR and the enhanced module services it provides which further streamline the large-scale deployments we see starting there now,” said Hierl.

“Thanks to Telit, their excellent support and high quality modules, product development was seamless and agile”, said Fu Jinzong, the technical director of Yupont. “More and more customers are satisfied with Beijing Yupont products, all this shows that our cooperation with Telit is our best choice. In the future, we look forward to expanding use of Telit for our new products to provide more applications, together with the development of China's M2M market.”